Door shutting on residents of last unrenovated Cabrini-Green row houses

Alexandra Chachkevitch, Chicago Tribune reporter

In about two weeks, Tamekia Murry will be forced to say goodbye to her childhood neighborhood and her home in the Frances Cabrini Rowhouses.

"I'm lost for words," Murry, 25, said one recent afternoon as she strolled with her 2-year-old son down a deserted street of boarded-up apartments. "It's gonna be hard."

The row houses, nestled next to Chicago's dynamic downtown, are all that survive of what was once one of the world's most famous public housing complexes. Now 440 row house units that haven't been remodeled are being closed.

Murry's family, along with the 18 other families who remained in unimproved units, will have to move. And the fate of these low-rise brick apartments, which once buzzed with life and hope, is up for grabs.

For developers, the land that was once Cabrini-Green is rich with promise, a tasty piece of steak. For nearby locals, the row houses are reminders of a poorer past, the last spots of dirt to wash away from the neighborhood. But for the remaining Cabrini-Green residents, who have long called this neighborhood home, the boarded-up windows and metal fences going up around some of the row houses represent yet another broken promise.

"It's a classic bait-and-switch," said Richard Wheelock, director of advocacy for the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, which represents families who lived in Cabrini-Green when the complex was slated for demolition in 1999.

Since that time, all of Cabrini's high-rises have been demolished — the last one came down in 2011 — and the neighborhood has steadily improved under the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion, 12-year-old Plan for Transformation.

Despite the change, year after year the CHA assured advocates for the poor that the row houses would be rehabilitated and used for public housing.

But last September, the CHA changed course. Officials announced in federal court that the row houses, which had already been nearly emptied of residents, would not be used solely as public housing in the future. After renovating one-fourth of the 586 units, the agency also announced that it would move out the remaining families in the unimproved portion of the complex by the end of February because of the buildings' deteriorating safety, and would no longer rehabilitate the remaining units.

A working group of city officials, advocates and neighborhood leaders is deliberating the future of the row houses, and "there are a lot of unanswered questions," Wheelock said.

Once a beacon of hope in a historically impoverished area, the row houses are among the oldest public housing developments in Chicago. Built in 1942, the complex offered affordable homes to working-class World War II veterans and their families. But over the years, hopeful expectations were dampened by rising violence, crime and drugs.

Today it is hard to see the past. The Cabrini-Green that once housed more than 15,000 people is now a small collection of deserted lawns and boarded-up windows amid trendy new restaurants and mixed-income condominiums.

Freshly built town houses sit on the dust and rubble from Cabrini-Green's high-rises. New restaurants make the once-avoided North Orleans Street buzz with traffic during lunchtime. And a newly opened gym caters to young professionals who are settling in the area.

Murry, who lives in a four-bedroom apartment with her aunt and her two sons. Robert, 10, and Rashad, 2, said she got a voucher to move to Section 8 housing but doesn't know yet where she will go.

"They say it's bad down here, but I don't see where it's better," Murry said, adding that her son Robert is upset over moving to another school. "Why they're moving us — I don't understand."

Other residents from Cabrini-Green's older row houses were moved to the remodeled row houses, which are all used for public housing and will remain that way for now, said Kellie O'Connell-Miller, CHA's senior vice president of strategic planning and public affairs.

But the future is uncertain as the community working group, which meets monthly, tries to come up with a compromise between residents, developers and other locals on the row houses' fate. There are some options for the unrehabbed row houses. They could be sold at market rate, torn down or turned into mixed-income housing.

Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, a member of the group, said the discussion has not gone far.

"I would hate for them to go," Burnett said, referring to a possible demolition of the row houses.

Wheelock worries that if the agency has its way, the amount of affordable housing in areas of opportunity will drop and residents will be moved to more remote and impoverished places.

Rikee Gibson, 21, who has lived in Cabrini-Green most of her life, said she saw the row house community struggle with increased violence after people from the high-rise buildings moved and mixed with other residents from just a few blocks away.

"They don't realize that once you put one project with another, they clash," said Gibson.

Although Gibson is living in a rehabbed row house, she is dismayed that the CHA has stopped updating the other row houses.

"Why remodel one half and not do the other?" said Gibson, echoing other residents in the community. "It makes no sense."

Mary Pattillo, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University whose work focuses on public housing and politics in Chicago, said the housing authority has failed to keep its word to the residents, creating a lack of trust.

"There is an ongoing history of broken promises," Pattillo said. "Better off not making promises to begin with."

Big & Little's, a fish taco restaurant, opened up two years ago near the Cabrini-Green row houses on North Orleans Street. Tony D'Alessandro, the business' co-owner, said he picked the location because it was cheap and close to downtown.

"There is a lot of potential for businesses," he said. "We didn't expect to grow as quickly as we did."

D'Alessandro said he has mixed feelings about the row houses.

"I think it's a waste of land right now," he said. "At least (they should) make them look nice."